Going to the dark side


I was doing so well on my daily word count goal - until recently. When I hit the 3/4 mark, I seemed to stall out. I was horribly tempted to start my first major revision, then finish the novel after all the editing. I did this with the last book, but this time, I questioned the impulse. It maybe that it's just how I work and I have to do it that way, but it doesn't make a ton of sense.

Until I realized... about 3/4 of the way through is when the villain starts acting out her or his nefarious plan. Since my books have a mystery at their core, they also have a pronounced bad guy (or girl) and even if I don't have tons of grisly on page violence, I've got a character with pretty dark intentions.

And the way that I write, is to fully imagine a scene before I put it on paper - or screen. I have to see the words before I type them. And I find that I don't want to let my mind go there - to what the villain really wants and almost let him or her get it. It's not nearly as fun as coming up with snappy dialog. This time, I even made it a lot more stylistic, so I thought I was ok, but no, not ok.

So, I'm just gonna have to deal and get through it quickly. I'm hoping to come up with a way around this in the future - but I haven't found one yet.

1 comments:

Tia Nevitt said...

"to what the villain really wants and almost let him or her get it"

Good way to put it! That is what we must do, expressed so simply! This may help me. Thanks!

September 22, 2009 at 5:12 PM

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